A Short History of Nearly Everything

Front Cover
Doubleday Canada, Sep 14, 2004 - Science - 560 pages
A wonder-filled quest to understand everything that has happened in the history of the earth, from the Big Bang theory to the rise of civilization and beyond—revised to reflect the last two decades of scientific advancement.

How did we get from being nothing at all to where we are today? How did the age of the dinosaurs eventually give way to the age of the iPhone? In this completely revised update to the international phenomenon A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson returns to answer these questions and many more.

Bryson brings a groundbreaking account of life itself to a new generation of readers and wonderers, as he takes subjects often passed off as boring and incomprehensible and renders them accessible, fascinating, and outright amusing to anyone who's ever wondered about the world around them. Introducing readers to a long list of the world's most impressive archaeologists, paleontologists, physicists, astronomers, anthropologists, and mathematicians—from their offices and laboratories to dig sites and field camps—Bryson embarks on a journey to discover answers to the biggest questions about the universe and ourselves.

A Short History of Nearly Everything 2.0 is a profoundly enlightening, surprisingly humorous, and charmingly clever adventure into the realm of human knowledge, as only Bryson can render it. His revamped Short History is a thrilling journey through time and space, and his writing will make readers both new and old see the world in a whole new way.

About the author (2004)

BILL BRYSON’s bestselling books include The Road to Little Dribbling, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, One Summer, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words, and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. His acclaimed work of popular science A Short History of Nearly Everything won the Aventis Prize and the Descartes Prize, spent seventy-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and has been translated into more than forty languages. Bill Bryson was Chancellor of Durham University from 2005 to 2011 and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He lives in England.

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